


Les Miserables original English version any% speedrun [1:48:51] [COMMENTATED]

by injygo



Category: Les Misérables (Movie 1935), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Can you find all the references?, Crack, Dracula Enjolras cameo, Fantine except we skip all her cutscenes, Gen, Javert ai manipulation, Jean Valjean controlled by a Twitch streamer, conspicuous absence of Gavroche, group watch inspired, multi-adaptation nonsense, the famous Thénardier skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:27:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23999755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/injygo/pseuds/injygo
Summary: Originally streamed live on Twitch by me, commentary also provided by me. Don't forget to like and subscribe for more fun videos!
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18





	Les Miserables original English version any% speedrun [1:48:51] [COMMENTATED]

**Author's Note:**

> I was watching the 1935 film adaptation in @pilferingapples' groupwatch, and someone said the pacing issues made the last half of the movie feel like a speedrun. So I started thinking of ways to explain the adaptation's choices as speed strats, and ended up drafting basically this whole fic in the group chat, which in retrospect was probably not super polite. I don't actually know anything about video games, so hopefully this is at least somewhat coherent.

Gooood morning Youtube, today I'll be speedrunning Victor Hugo's Les Misérables! Okay, I'll get right to it, starting in 3, 2, 1, go.

So first off we have a bunch of unskippable cutscenes, everyone's favorite. There's a recently discovered strat to gain control of Valjean during the opening cutscene so you don't have to sit through half an hour, but it doesn't save that much time and there's a chance you can softlock, so I'm just going to do it the intended way. In the musical version there's actually a way to skip it entirely and start in Montreuil-sur-Mer, which is really convenient, but so far nothing like that exists in the film version.

So Fantine actually has a lot of backstory in the lore but it takes a long time so, yeah, we're going to just, jump backwards into the wall seven times annnd, skipped.

That was actually the first skip discovered and it was the reason that anyone ran this game in the first place, although I think the first real speedrun didn't even use it, it was considered so unreliable. But the community has known about it for so long that we've got a really reliable setup. Turns out that if you pause right when the screen goes black you can input a very specific set of commands into the item choosing menu and the game will interpret it as part of your save data. Technically this is a memory corruption glitch, but it only lets you set flags on the current quest, which right now is saving Fantine, and it only works if there's a intermission cutscene ending, so we can't use it to skip straight to the end. I know, disappointing. This glitch probably saves what, three hours over the course of the run?

But yeah you input the flags through the D-pad and then if you backflip into a wall immediately after the cutscene without doing any additional movement, each time you get pushed out of the wall it sets a new flag, so we do that seven times to skip the first seven parts of the Fantine quest. So we take the first, second, first dialogue options, that gets us the mayor's sash with the fewest textboxes, and here's Fantine for the first time, blink and you'll miss it, get the candlesticks, and here's Javert's introduction.

So the AI in this game is really weird, Javert will default to following you everywhere but he won't actually arrest you until you meet certain criteria. So you can see he's just kind of trailing along bumping into us because we haven't done the cart miniquest yet. Skip through his introductory dialogue, then next time you leave the office it'll trigger Fantine's next scene. Okay, so the intended route is for Mme. Victurnien to get Fantine fired but we skipped that flag with the glitch so instead she comes here right away, skips a whole long resource management minigame. Okay so we pick this dialogue option to trigger Javert's letter, that's important to get. Really a lot of this game is about making sure Javert shows up at the right times, since the run technically ends when he kills himself, so the goal is basically to use the other characters to get through his arc as fast as possible without having to sit through too many cutscenes.

Fun fact, this is the first time Cosette is mentioned in the run.

If you pick up Fantine and run with her as soon as you regain control of Valjean, you can get to the hospital before Javert is done talking, which skips about thirty seconds. Okay so this is another one of those things we do to manipulate Javert's AI, we show off our strength which apparently proves we're a convict or something, idk I never watched the opening. Anyway there are a lot of sidequests that work for this, this is just the closest and fastest one. Don't try to recruit the townsfolk, that doesn't work, they won't accept the money and it's just a time loss. And... got the closeup on Javert's face at the end, that's how you know you got it. Okay we're good, this is... an okay time, it's decent, the run's still viable.

So we run this game in black and white, original English film version. The game was originally in French, but the port to English introduced a whole bunch of glitches, most of which got patched out later. I think the WR on the current patch is 2 hours 30 something and we're going to do this in hopefully under 1:45, so it's a significant time save. For comparison, the French any% run is a little under four hours, so, yeah.

Okay so on to the first major glitch of this run, the Thénardier skip. So it turns out that if you leave for Arras before Javert gets the letter from Paris, the game gets confused and it thinks you're in the post-trial section, and it spawns Cosette in the first town you get to, which normally would be Montfermeil, but here it's Arras. This is convenient for a couple reasons, first of all it means you can fast travel to Arras so you don't have to do the carriage miniquest, plus Arras just has a way better inn setup for speed purposes, the game normally has Cosette walking through the woods to the well, but here the pump is right there, so that saves about four minutes of just going and fetching water. Most importantly, it lets us get Cosette right away here, instead of doing the Bargain of Treachery miniboss fight. 

Now that might seem a bit confusing if you've only played the game casually, what happens here is that the Thénardiers at this point are already in Montfermeil, because they sent the letter and the game knows where to put them, but we skipped Fantine's backstory, which also skips Cosette in Montfermeil, so we can get her by traveling to any town. and since she wasn't really supposed to be in Arras in the first place, we can just take her with us without having to pay anyone. We basically have infinite cash but opening the item menu takes time, so whenever we can avoid it that's good.

So something that I didn't explain earlier is that all NPC dialogue is stored in one of three big files, one for each act, and different dialogue triggers just specify different points to start reading from the file. But some of them don't say the line number, but instead say to start reading from the last line read, or LLR. Now, there's no way to decrease the LLR, so if you somehow get it to desync, like with a sequence break, you can play dialogue ahead of time and effectively skip it. This comes up a lot in the late game, and we use it right here to skip most of the Owl and Wren section by playing the dialogue while waiting for Javert to come denounce himself.

You might be wondering why it didn't play Javert's dialogue here instead of the Owl and Wren bit, but that's because normally characters only say their own lines even with LLR manipulation, outside of a few edge cases that we'll get to later. I think the community consensus is that some of this behavior was dev intended, so that you could go around interfering with the game plot and it would still give you the same basic beats, but they never thought we would break it quite this much. Really it's surprising it's as coherent as it is, really shows their dedication to having the game fail gracefully.

Fun fact, if you accept his resignation there there's no way to win the game, but it doesn't tell you this until the trial scene is over. That tripped up a lot of people playing it casually.

So the fastest way to complete this section is to burn your clothes in the fireplace, but the game doesn't check if they're actually on fire, just if they're within a certain rectangle on the floor, so we just chuck them sort of near the fire and it counts. And there's the carriage skip i was talking about earlier, we just fast travel to Arras and it saves like fifteen minutes. There's other ways to get it but this is the most convenient, especially as we're already doing the Thénardier skip.

Okay so this entire trial scene is just unskippable cutscenes, triggered by entering the courthouse. There's a bit in the middle where you get to press A, I guess. If you don't press A you lose immediately though, so it's not exactly riveting gameplay.

Options 3,1,2 here, it's hardcoded. You're supposed to read the manual to find that out, there's no indication ingame.

And since we didn't choose the second option when talking to Javert, we can just skip the rest of this and fast travel back to M sur M. if you try to skip any earlier than that you softlock, but once the game registers that you turned yourself in you don't have to stick around. the judge just lets you walk away, it's fine.

Turns out the fastest thing here is actually the intended strat -- there's a special cutscene for if you get Javert to arrest you in front of Fantine, and it's twice as fast as if you did Fantine's death and the confrontation separately. This next bit, though, isn't intended, you're supposed to get caught by the cops and break out of prison later, but that's slow and we gotta go fast.

So you just get far enough away from the cops and then, clip out of bounds, here, and they forget about you. You gotta be careful though, because the chase scene is technically still going on, and if a cop sees you it'll start again, so if the routing looks a little weird to you, that's why.

And here's where the LLR glitch earlier saves time, the Owl and Wren sequence is half as long as it should be since the dialogue that's not about the landlady happened back in M sur M. There's no new dialogue there because the act's about to end, which means it's the end of the file. Ending the act also ends the chase scene, so you don't have to worry about cops other than Javert (who follows you no matter what). It also lets us skip Marius' backstory with the same glitch we used at the beginning of act II for Fantine. You can't see it because the camera is panning around, but I'm jumping into the hedge behind me, ten, eleven, twelve times.

We can't skip the entire convent sequence because we need to leave the convent to progress the story. Fortunately, to skip the leaving cutscene, we can use a glitch where you trigger a scripted event and then you trigger another one on the very next frame -- the first one gets flagged as complete but only the second one plays. Unfortunately there's not a lot of places this glitch is possible, since even though it's "open-world" there's not a lot of events that can be triggered in different places. It's mostly just the cadène and Javert sparing you after the barricade, everything else is tied to a specific location.

Yeah that was Fauchelevent, it makes more sense if you know the lore. Anyway that dialogue was just to set up the LLR for when we need it later.

Okay so here is where the run starts to really pick up. Turns out if you skip Marius' backstory you also skip the Amis, which means that when the game tries to introduce Marius it also introduces the Amis at the same time, which, well, you'll see. You'll also notice there's no Gorbeau ambush, that's because Marius just spawned here and doesn't actually have a place to live, so there's no way for the sidequest to trigger.

Yeah apparently when you skip too many digressions the Opinions meter overflows and you get glitchy dialogue like this. It wouldn't affect the storyline, except for a different bug, specific to this version. So basically, in the early versions of the game they had trouble with Javert's AI. It wouldn't be able to navigate and it'd get stuck in a corner or something. The French version dealt with this by spawning a new Javert NPC somewhere near the stuck one, which usually worked but occasionally you'd end up with two or three Javerts if the stuck one somehow got unstuck. The American version doesn't check for stuckness at all but instead teleports Javert near the player whenever a certain condition is met. Normally it's whenever someone other than Javert says "Valjean", but in this version for some reason it's whenever someone other than Javert mentions the Law or Justice. So because of Marius' glitched dialogue here, Javert shows up in the Luxembourg.

Also, because Marius is also the Amis here, Javert flags him as a revolutionary and starts chasing him. If you time it right you can actually get Marius to be all the Amis at the same time, I think we only get Combeferre, Courfeyrac, and Bossuet here though. Seriously though, props to the devs for making the game somehow still winnable through all of this.

This bit is why I have this second controller plugged in -- I can use this to control adult Cosette, so I can go straight to where Marius is without having to go through the whole Stalker Marius miniquest, otherwise required to complete the game. The dialogue sounds awkward because it's supposed to play the first time Marius and Cosette talk to each other, normally in the Luxembourg or in the house on the rue Plumet. We skipped the rue Plumet though, so the game would crash if we let it proceed normally. That's uh, pretty common in the last half of the run.

So all, or I guess most of, the LLR manipulation is to make sure that nobody mentions Thénardier. Marius has a thing like Javert except that since we didn't get his backstory, the game crashes whenever anyone says "Thénardier". That's why you'll sometimes see odd bits of dialogue out of place, like with Eponine talking to Marius there.

I'm not actually sure which of the glitches going on causes Enjolras' texture to be corrupted like that, or if it's its own separate thing. Enjoy it while it lasts, we won't be seeing much of it again.

Fun fact, because of rescuing Cosette early and telling her about what's happening, our Morality is high enough to get the best ending even though we yell at Cosette. It wasn't planned that way, it just worked out that that was the fastest way to get through this conversation. That's why there's not a separate any% best ending category.

So one side effect of skipping the carriage sidequest before the trial is that if we ever get into a carriage afterwards, the game will think we're doing the carriage sidequest and immediately teleport us to the road to Arras. We don't want that to happen, so we're going to be careful to not get in this carriage or the one later with Javert. The Luxembourg carriage doesn't count, it's just a texture overlaid on the scene, not an actual carriage object.

Oh man, i forgot to mention the Gavroche thing, didn't I? Okay so this is a really weird glitch that's caused by the Thénardier skip. You see, since we never go to Montfermeil, we never get close enough to the inn for the game to spawn in Gavroche, and unlike Eponine here where the game just creates her as soon as you get to Paris, for some reason in this version there's no other trigger to make him spawn. It's probably related to the thing where his age doesn't advance at the same rate as other characters, that happens a lot even in relatively glitchless runs.

Anyway, this is supposed to be the scene with Gavroche and Valjean where he delivers Marius' letter, but since both Eponine and Gavroche have the "messenger" trait, Eponine can give Valjean the letter here instead. That's good because without that we wouldn't be able to advance the plot, but it also means that we can do _this_ glitch. You see, since the dialogue here is supposed to end with Gavroche running off singing, if you sorta, wedge your way between her and the door, she'll just keep talking through all the lines that she has in the whole game. Now you'd think that wouldn't save time, but it's actually really important that she has no lines left so that we can do the entire barricade in under six minutes, which turns out to matter a lot, actually.

So the main problem with Gavroche not existing is that since he's a Symbolic character, the game crashes if the camera is ever pointed at where he's supposed to be, even in a cutscene. So we gotta time the whole barricade sequence to be over before the first cutscene he's in, exactly six minutes and twenty seconds after the barricade sequence starts. At this point it gets a bit hard to follow, so bear with me as I try to explain what's going on.

Yep, there's Javert standing under the sign that says "justice", that's the teleporting thing I mentioned before. Okay so we take Eponine with us, because even though we never get the Patron-Minette sidequest that would let us take control of her, she still has the "player-controllable" trait, it's just switched off. So that lets us skip barricade scenes by holding up on one controller and down on the other as we pass through a loading zone. We use this to repeatedly dodge in and out of the café to essentially fast forward to the first attack. I don't really understand the details, but it sort of makes all the time-gated scenes play at the same time, but the game thinks they've completed? The important thing is, they don't count towards the timer for the Gavroche cutscene.

It has to be a player controllable character because otherwise the game ignores the second controller entirely. It would work with Cosette too, except that when you bring Cosette to the barricade weird stuff starts happening, so we try to avoid that when routing out a speedrun.

We ran through the café in a way that got Javert to stand where he would be spotted right away, but even without manips he usually gets detected pretty quickly. This is another one of those Gavroche scenes where he can be replaced by other characters, which is really fortunate for us, because if you don't get this plot beat you won't get Javert's suicide and that's our win condition.

That's not Gavroche, it's Navet, confusing I know. Anyway as you can see it's all kind of happening at once, so fast that the National Guard aren't even in place yet, so as they're running to their marks we get this amusing "shootout".

Since we skipped the Blotter, Blabber puzzle, we need to do a little wrestling with our conscience here in order to choose the right thing. It's pretty easy, you just spam right and left alternately until the closeup ends, and you know it worked if you can take out the knife, like that.

And as you see that was the last of Eponine's lines, so we can be done with the whole barricade sequence if we just grab Marius like this and bunny hop past these enemies into the sewers. 5:59, not bad, not bad.

So movement through the sewers is REALLY SLOW, so we don't pull the trapdoor closed which means Javert follows us immediately. In 100% runs we time it so we encounter Javert when coming out of the sewer, but it turns out it's actually faster to let him follow you, since if Thénardier isn't there you'd have to wait for almost a minute for Javert to investigate the grating of his own accord.

Everyone hates this part. Unfortunately there's no way to skip it if you want to save Marius, which you have to do to get a good ending, so uh, enjoy, I guess.

So what happened there was that we were fast enough to get to the fontis before Javert caught us, which, just like the chase scene before, means the scene is still technically going even after we get out. That means we can just run to the rue l'Homme-Armé, skipping the address exchange and cab ride entirely, and since Javert walks slower than we do, when we're done at home he'll be right there. Convenient!

We skipped Gillenormand so we just bring Marius directly to Cosette. He's bleeding and covered in sewage but it's fine, he'll be fine. This game doesn't even have poison effects, it's just water with a different palette. Anyway yeah just a few things left now, can you believe it's almost over? Find Javert, whoops not there, other corner, okay there he is. Have the dialogue from the cab which we skipped before, go back to see Cosette one last time.

See, there he is, all better. Told you he'd be fine. So normally this dialogue doesn't happen until after the wedding, but since we did that LLR manip a half hour ago we can just start it now. And then, we can pick up the candlesticks and use them on Cosette to immediately go into the death monologue, which normally only happens after ten or fifteen more minutes of gameplay.

So the only thing we need to win is for Javert to drown himself. The trick here is to wait in the doorway just long enough that you'll be too late to save him, so you can get the best ending immediately instead of either taking a hit to Morality or having to go through another half hour or so to get the alternate ending. Aaannnnnd... time. How'd I do? 1:48:51, not bad for a marathon run. Anyway that's Les Misérables any% original English film version, thanks for watching!


End file.
